Greedy Goblin

Monday, June 7, 2010

The orb whisperer

Yesterday the blue-gear only Undergeared went to ICC again. We had a very new warlock and a frost mage who haven't raided with us in 2 months (as usual, the people who was online). And 19 tries later:

What took so long? At first Kesseleth has some weird resist mechanic. I know that the empowered shadow bolt cannot be resisted, but the normal shadow bolt, and the nucleus damage is resistable. So I collected 630 buffed shadow res, expecting to have near-zero damage from them. Well, it didn't work. I usually resisted 300 out of the 900 nucleus damage. I resisted the fire orb damage better (with 320 FR). We couldn't figure out what's going on because on the first tries wiped in 10-20 secs. Only when we lived long enough to have enough data we saw that SR won't help us here. I switched back to normal DPS and Ulatekso started tanking Kesseleth because hunters have deterrence to "shield wall" one empowered shadow bolt, and he has much better situational awareness anyway. That included sending his pet to tank the kinetic orb. You can see it in his PoV and Maladroite's.

We lived longer. I mean 2-3 mins with tank healths usually in the 20% range. So we switched to 4 healers. We had some very successful tries when our tank had to log. Luckily we had a priest online to come in heal, while the paladin healer went to tank. Some more tries and the princes were on the ground and we get the "did not stand in the fire" achievement. According to WoWprogress, 68% of the guilds killed the princes. So 1/3 of the guilds in full farmed 4pT10 couldn't do what our 3300GS guild did. Think about that.

PS: since we definitely can't kill anything in ICC without gear, next week we try to do the opposite. We'll see how successful that will be.

Update: Anonymous pointed out that the warlock logged out in epic gear. It wouldn't be much of a problem (many do HCs in epics to avoid kick), but his feed has not shown any activity after the Blood Princes kill. Also, his chest item looks very similar to the one visible on the screenshot. Such gear is directly against the Undergeared rules.

However log inspection shows that his crit would be much higher in epic gear, and also his HP was in the blue range. Pictures from the videos show him in blue gear. It seems he equiped epic gear to look good on the screenshot which was a stupid move. However further efforts will be made, including an addon, manual inspects and a new rule to keep all epic gear in the bank during raids to avoid accidental equips.

61 comments:

Anonymous
said...

First of all I would like to say I'm a huge fan. You have a lot of good, informative posts on your blog. However, I'm emailing you about your Undergeared projected. I saw that you downed BP in ICC 10. While I thought it was a testament to how important skill is, I noticed your warlock, Underfear, seemed to be in some epic gear. I checked out his armory page and all of his gear is epic except for his trinket. The gear in his armory is the same that is in the picture of the BP kill. This is obviously a direct contradiction to the mission statement of Undergeared. Even the first line of the post says "Yesterday the blue-gear only Undergeared went to ICC again." While I know that you consider yourself an anti-social "goblin," even you can see that lying about the project deals a direct blow to the goal you're trying to achieve.

However, that said, I explained why more gear and optimization is actually necessary for hardmode encounters really, here in my blog.

On that grounds, I would enjoy challenging you to do any one of the hardmodes of bosses available (In this content, it means bosses in Ulduar that drop different loot when killed this way, or any hardmode from TotC and upwards).

I realise some of them would be mathematically impossible, yet at the same time, I *am* hoping to see you do at least one or two odd bosses.

@ first anonymousPlease have a look at the videos that me and Ulatekso made. You can see the warlock several times and it's clear that he is not wearing the same gear there (He has that gimpmask from UK on). I also inspected him once in ICC and he had full blue gear (+ lvl 70 epic wand which is allowed).

I do realise that it looks bad, and he definitely shouldn't have switched to his regular epic gear for the screenshot... >.< But the members are allowed to wear whatever gear they like outside of the raids though.

Underfear also got the "Epic" achievement on June 5th, same day BP went down. Either he put on some epic gear for a non-raid event and forgot to take it off, or he's cheesing your "blue only" attempts and ruining everyone else's efforts because he was bored or something.

I checked the armory for Underfear and I am also wondering: what is "blue-gear only" supposed to mean? Save for one slot, the dude is almost completely "purple" with the highest ilvl being 232. Granted, ilvl 232 is pretty low, but still... that's not blue... What gives?

"I checked out his armory page and all of his gear is epic except for his trinket. The gear in his armory is the same that is in the picture of the BP kill."

I checked his armory too, none of his gear is the same in the picture to my eyes. The robe looks similar, but even that looks slightly different. I couldn't find a robe on wowhead that looked exactly like the robe in the picture, but for all I know it's some crappy lvl 135 green robe that looks similar to plagueheart, he said the warlock was very new to undergeared. Or, it actually was plagueheart and the ingame shot just looks slightly different than all the screenshots on wowhead/etc. But, since all of the other gear looked very different, I'm going to assume it was some lvl 135 green item until further information comes out.

I personally wouldn't equip epic gear on my undergeared character at all, but if that's not a rule they have, then...well in any case you should check the picture more carefully before posting such accusations.

@Telia: he did ToC after the raid, according to the feed. Also, he is wearing Merlin's robe that looks completely different from the gear on the screenshot. Also if you check the log, no way he could cast so little frostbolts with that gear.

@Andru: because he obviously posted the same comment on other sites. You can't silence anyone on the internet. Deleting him would only make the impression that the cheating is supported and widespread in the guild.

if the warlock really wore that epic gear then the dps he pulled is bad, which implies he's a crapper.meaning they even managed to pull a boon through the fight.

also in the original post it already mentions the presence of a new warlock so even if he did wear epic it's just for this kill and clearly he wants to sabotage the project. who knows maybe some horde from magtheridon wanted revenge :p

For what it's worth, since Underfear was a transfer when I invited him to the raid (I was the one doing the inicial invites since Gevlon was a bit late) I made sure to check that his gear conformed to the rules, and it did. When we were pulling the Blood Princes' trash, he was on blue gear (with that epic lvl 70 wand he got in the Kara run we did earlier).

I must admit I didn't inspect him again during our 19 tries, but I'm pretty sure he didn't cheat on the fight.

His increased damage may be explained by the simple fact that he is a warlock. On this fight there's a lot of movement going around and having hard-hitting dots on the target that tick regardless of your movement is certainly a plus.

One easy way to check this is doing the math. How hard were his spells supposed to be ticking the in epic gear he's wearing, and how hard were they ticking in the logs?

Ignoring the cheating issue. I found this post the most interesting to date on your progress. You focussed more on the "how" and less on the "proof". I can see real value in the how you did it, mitigation you used, who did which role, what class was best suited and so forth.

It's really a shame if it turns out that he really tried to screw you up. But I know you won't get discouraged by such trolling. If anything it will have an opposite effect. But it's sad that you'll have to waste time on inspecting each other every now and then. I suppose it's a bit of a side effect of having a guild that is so casual in it's construction, where you pick whoever is online rather than really getting to know each other the way you do when you raid more regularly.

The crit percent he has in his epic gear (24.65%) is inconsistent with the incinerate crits overall (25.3%).

However, this is only at first glance. Liviann has HOTC specced, which should add a 3% crit. (Which admitedly, only appears on 1/3 of the bosses.) Assuming equal dps time between all 3 bosses, it would mean that the consollidated crit chance he should have is 25.65%. Which is pretty close to 25.3%.

I'm not entirely convinced there aren't any other +crit buffs or debuffs in the raid though.

The math can be done for hit too, but I'm not familiar with caster hit mechanics so I can't do it.

It seriously sickens me to see the lengths some people would go to sabotage the dedicated work of others. Mankind is disgusting...

In the picture you can clearly see that the warlock is wearing the horde version of ToC shoulders. So one of the two happened: he either did the fight in this gear or switched the gear for the picture in question.

Frankly it is an accomplishment, being able to go this far into ICC in blue gear. Hell, I believe you have proven enough already. You're doing more than "casual" guilds have managed to do.

But the act of this idiot warlock, of sabotaging the raid, proves to me exactly what I was saying all along. That trying to convince idiots of anything is pointless. The M&S and the social can go fuck themselves for all I care. I wouldn't waste my time trying to make a statement targeted at such garbage human beings.

Its actually very easy to go to WoWHead and "create" a character with the gear in that list of epics ON the character to see what they look like so no need to wait for him to login to prove his innocence.

BUT. He could just as easily have been wearing blues, then switched to Epics just before starting a boss encounter then afterwards switched back so you might need evidence during the encounter not before or after.

I don't know, his earlier activity shows that he's obtaining "BiS blue gear" rapidly, namely on the 29th, 30th, and 31st of May. Why would anyone do heroics for 3 days and obviously Need on the blue items, to get sub-par gear for the Undergeared project, just to equip his epic kit for the raid? It's beyond me.

Unless of course it's a mistake of his, forgetting about it or messing up with an outfitter addon AND not realizing it the whole night. Which is also hard to imagine, but still possible I guess.

To me, it's obvious that most of his gear isn't the same as the one he's wearing now in armory. Just align his armory toon in the same position as he's in on the first screenshot, for example. But it still looks pretty bad (he could still have been wearing epic rings/trinkets).

@Andru: Baitra is frost mage, so +5% crit on his target (a bit less, since on target switching he have to build it up with 5 frostbolts).

I had 28% AB crit, 12 from gear, 6 from Incineration, 3 from clearcasting, 1-2 from focus magic, 3 from arcane instability, all together 25-26%, so Baitra most probably provided 2-3% overall crit.

@Anonymous: he was never tanking Kesseleth.

@Gusztav: we are not talking about a random cheater who wanted to cheat for himself "look guyz i so l33t i kill icc bosses in blue gear and No1 DPS while orb-tanking lol". That case he would cheat more subtly, like wearing top level jewelry. We are talking about a saboteur who did it to undermine Undergeared, making the impression that we all cheat.

@Maladroite: his gear on the screenshot is obviously different from the gear on mine. One can also easily recognize Flameheart Spell Scalpel on both of your picture, so he fought with blue weapon, despite swapping weapons is the easiest way of cheating.

Also, his crit rate is much smaller than his epic gear should give.

I think he fought with blue gear and equipped epic for the screenshot to screw us up. I mean no one will start inspecting AFTER the fight.

He might have simply equipped his epic set to "look good" on the screenshot. When my main's guild poses for a screenshot, we have the most silly outfits flying around, but surely nobody will accuse our Boomkin of raiding with Cookie's Tenderizer.

While Mala's video footage was a bit fuzzy, and in mine I was zoomed out too much, I too thought that I recognized the Spell-Scalpel, at least. I also thought his robe looked a bit darker than the epic one he was wearing in the screenshot did. Between Livian's Heart of the Crusader, Winter's Chill and the three intellect buffs, his crit is also lower than expected in his epic gear.

At any rate, he might've swapped to his epics for posing without realizing the consequences it could have. The blue gear grind he did a few days earlier shows that he has good intentions.

Acutally, if you look at the death logs ( http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/4gvpsuzhc3srpfyg/details/9/?enc=bosses ) you can see that he had around 34k hp.I guess that considering the 20% buff, that amount is easily reachable in blue gear (as demo are usually having more hp than other clothies).The 21:46:22.640 death is the most obvious. He was full life, as proven by the overheal of his Soul Leach, and got OS with a 22k effective damage (and a 57k overkill, hi Keleseth)

As for his dps, our Spriest is always 1st dps on this boss, as the DoT you put on 1% bosses will continue to be recorded as full damage even though they technically do no damage.

Finally, by looking at his DPS for the kill, ( http://www.worldoflogs.com/reports/4gvpsuzhc3srpfyg/details/9/?s=12507&e=13087 ) he has had some misses, which is to be expected in blue gear, but impossible in epic gear, as he is over the hit cap before the raid buffs (11%)

he surelly did the boss in blue gear and then switch to his epic gear for the screen. I often do the same and use my T3 gear for screens even though I did the boss wearing T10.

As the current evidence shows, both the cheating and the sabotage versions are incorrect. He made a stupid move to look good on the screenshot.

I can even recall he complained how bad blue gear look earlier that day when we did a DPS benchmark. I inspected him on that benchmark and he did slightly higher damage then me, similarly to the fight.

Underfear here. Sorry to cause confusion. Indeed I went and swithced over to my heroic-farming-gear with t9 helm and shoulders for looks to get my own screenshots. I honestly thought that other pictures were already taken. I indeed raid in FULL blue gear with exception of my wand which is an epic from Karazhan.

As for the "Epic"-achievement. I bought t9 helm and shoulders prior to the raid which gave me the achievement. Please forgive me, I come from the world of alliancecraft where every tier9 looks like crap. Horde tier9 sets look so awesome to me :)

I was just looking through your members wanting to check something that hadn't been mentioned before to my knowledge, when I saw a blacksmith it answered my question but provided another, why do blacksmiths have blue gems in their profession sockets when all the other professions are balanced around those blacksmith sockets having epic gems in them?

Well, I'm impressed with this project and to tell the truth I didn't think you could get past the 1st boss of ICC. Trust me there are a lot of people that haven't taken down the 1st wing of ICC and most of the have i245 gear. Even with epic gear, the slackers can't put out over 3K dps with a 20% buff.

Actually, I think you have already proven your point since most of the player base will never see Princes because they are not smart enough to know you can skip past Putricide. (which is just another dance that I am sure you can handle) Salute.

I find it rather curious that, instead of proving everybody wrong by murdering Festergut (or is it Rotface? I always confuse the two) you opted to do a much easier boss instead of proving... oh, let's just call them "socials" and be done with it. Why? It surely isn't because of tank gibs, which you seem to assume everyone who disagrees with you believes.

"According to WoWprogress, 68% of the guilds killed the princes. So 1/3 of the guilds in full farmed 4pT10 couldn't do what our 3300GS guild did. Think about that."

This doesn't make any sense. What makes you think that the bottom 1/3 of guilds is in full farmed T10? Most likely they are not. In fact, since 7.75% of guilds haven't even killed Marrowgar, some of them probably have no T10 other than what they've gotten from welfare frost emblems.

If you'd said full T9, I'd have bought that. Since anyone with a pulse can grind heroics to get that full 232 gear.

Seems I only saw this once everything had been cleared up, but I'd just like to add that you can in fact see his gear clearly in the videos. In the tank's PoV you can see him to the tank's left (0:53), and he's wearing blue shoulders (from all level 178+ shoulders the only shoulders that use this model that looks almost like there's no shoulders at all, that is they're very small and tight are in the 200 or less range). All the other models stick out somewhat, t10 is a tower with glowing runes and the t9 he has in the screenshot glows red and is very pointy and sticks out. The only other shoulder it could feasibly be is the piece from the first boss in HC FoS, I couldn't find a good shot that shows the color of the shoulders but if you watch the vid (or compare with WoW model viewer like I did) you'll see they couldn't be those.

Also at the start of the hunter PoV you see him to the right of the hunter, where the flameheart spell scalpel (or any other blue that uses the same model) is obviously visible. The only thing i'm not sure about is his head, he's either wearing the blue "gimp helm" or nothing at all and that's his undead haircut. The hunter PoV looks like the former and the tank PoV like the latter so I can't decide which is more likely.

So if he did wear any unallowed stuff in his kill it would have to be the less visible stuff like rings necklaces belts etc. He could have used a cloak which is hidden and a helm which I'm not sure is even hidden. This would imply actual cheating which is completely inconsistent with him wearing his full epic gear with both helm and cloak showing for the screenshot which would just attract attention (like it did).

Someone else mentioned wanting more details on how you overcome mechanics. I'd enjoy reading that as well. I was intrigued that you 4-healed princes. My own guild went from 3 to 2 healers to have plenty of ranged DPS to cover the room, keep kinetic orbs up, and kite the purple orbs to the pally tanking Keleseth.

First time commenting on here, so here goes: just wanted to say I think it is a testament to you and your guild to do ICC in blues. I read about this on your blog a few posts back. I applaud your efforts and will continue to be reading to see your progression. I also want to commend you on your rules for your guild. It takes respect and dedication to hold up to those rules and standards and I think it is great. Keep up the good work and keep pressing on!

@The anonymous asking about HotT/Dedicated Insanity: It should be possible, I'll look into it tomorrow. If you have an account on mmo-champion or wowace, pm me there (Treeston and stolenlegacy, respectively).

It's pretty obvious after reading all this that the warlock used his blue gear. But it's good that you're watching for cheating because that only makes Undergeared more legitimate. I don't really understand why engineers can wear their epic head item but that's been stated all along that it is allowed. Everything seems legit to me. After reading about this project I just laugh when I see people asking for high gear scores on their raids. I wish my guild was more like this and got everybody to learn the fights instead of worrying about everybody's gear.

"It seriously sickens me to see the lengths some people would go to sabotage the dedicated work of others. Mankind is disgusting..."

Yeah, cleary wanting proof that he is doing what he says he is doing is absolutely insane. Or, it's common sense. If he's telling the truth, fact checking is going to absolutely nothing to his credibility anyway.

As another commentor brought up, i'm surprised Festergut isn't dead as well. Well done, other than the fiasco with the warlock.

to follow up with nije, an alt i leveled to 80 what seems not to long ago, has 2pc t10 and 2pc T9.25. Any casual that has somewhat played and/or raided since icc was released would have full t10 frost gear and probably all frost badge gear. At the least they would be called high geared ToGC toons if they stepped foot in icc at all.

I'm not sure why there's such a big deal placed on the final screenshot. They could've done the kill in full epics, and switched to blue gear for the screenshot too. It's the kill video and the logs that mater significantly more.

Nije, not true. In that not everybody runs dailies every day and not everybody runs weeklies and voa every week. In addition for example my holy priest wears 245 t9 2pce because thats superior to 251 and t10 tpce.

I not trying to say that undergeared did not excel here and do something that many would consider impossible ,just that not everybody is in t10 for example on my DK recently 3 weeks @ 80. Did 7/12 including princes and one shot the lot it was a full alt run(no mains), at that point i still needed 4 triumph emblem upgrades and had one frost emblem upgrade. No 4pce t10 their, heck not even one t10 and I got turned down for a toc10 that week because my gs was too low(4800)

I started out as a fan, and from my point of view this project proved successful when ulduar was done(thinking how much we avoided to enter ulduar at that time because we thought are gear is lame - naxx10 gear + pvp/blues)

Your point is proven skill > gear. But did anyone doubt this ? I think not.

Now think back, why did you started the project ? ("LFM ToC10 5.5k gs") - that sounds like an exaggeration to me, but let's play along.

For me no matter how many bosses you do the project has no meaning (although it is a very fun one)

To counter the masses you must pick up 9 ppl from trade within 1 hour and see how much you clear with them (obviously you are a good organizer, so this should not be a problem).

Document your attempt and enlighten us how to pick up random members for our group without being assholes or without already benefiting from patient, experienced players in our group.

So within 1h gather 9 ppl without using any influence you might have before you start PUGing - document your run.

The damage from the Nuclei is spellshadow, which means it's arcane/shadow and will take whichever resist value is lower between the two when calculating resists. The reason you would get 300/1000 (or whatever) resists on the Nuclei damage is that you had Mark of the Wild which gives you enough arcane resist to get ~10-20% resist.

Doing some research and paying attention to your combat log/boss mechanics would probably make this project easier.